Consider the Children in Your Dental Marketing
Are you feeling the pinch of the economy? I think we all are. The tendency during tough economic times is for businesses to try to broaden their appeal. They widen their value proposition to try to appeal to every segment of the market. Dental practices are no different than any other business. The correct course of action is not to broaden your appeal but to narrow it.
I know it seems counter-intuitive to narrow your marketing but you need to hear me out on this. You can strengthen the ROI of each marketing dollar you spend if you narrow your focus and occupy only one niche of the market but dominate that niche in the area of your dental practice.
There are several small segments of the dental market that can be targetted.
- Children’s Dentistry – Example Site
- Sedation Dentistry – Example Site
- Cosmetic Dentistry – Example Site
There are dozens of other niches out there. Ask yourself these questions:
1. What is it that I am truly best at?
2. What type of dentistry do I enjoy the most?
3. What type of dentistry is most lucrative for my practice?
Then, go out there and target those markets. Dominate them with your marketing spend.
This doesn’t mean you need to turn back your regular clients and convert your entire practice over to a niche. However, when it comes to your marketing spend you should consider honing your message rather than applying a “shotgun” approach that attempts to be all things to all people.
A great place to hone your message is on your website. Use SEO to target keywords specific to a niche. Niche keywords are much easier to begin ranking for quickly.  If you need some help developing a list of niche keywords, get the first lesson in the SEO training videos entitled ‘Professional Keyword Research’ FREE by filling out your name and email on our home page.
April 16, 2009
Posted in: High Impact Actions 
One Comment
Schedulinx Online Appointment Scheduling Software
If you have been reading this blog for very long you know that it is critical that you are able to take a visitor to your dental website and convert them into a patient. Schedulinx is online appointment scheduling software for dentists and other professionals that need the capability to schedule appointments from the Internet.
Have a look at this video tutorial and check them out at www.schedulinx.com.
April 8, 2009
Posted in: Uncategorized No Comments
Real Dentists Own Blogs
I hoped to get your attention with that headline as I am being somewhat facetious. Of course it is not absolutely necessary for you to be blogging to be a “real” dentist. As much as it pains me to say that. 
However, I wanted to put another plug in for the blog because of its uncanny ability to breathe life into a website and increase your search engine rankings almost immediately.
I don’t know if you have noticed but I have taken a sabbatical from this blog for a few weeks to work on some other projects and my traffic has really died down since I have stopped posting. Google loves blogs and Google loves bloggers that keep up their blogs.
A website that is not being updated is the equivalent of a building on a main thoroughfare that is not being well kept. It signals to Google and the others that the site is aging and thus the content on it may be out of date. In fact, the entire dental practice could be defunct for all they know. After all, they haven’t seen or heard anything from you in a while. In most cases Google will decide to move your website off of that main thoroughfare (its search results for those following along at home) and replace it with something that is better kept.
Bottom line — to be a real dentist you have to go to graduate dental school. But, if you want to watch your website rocket to the top of the search results pages – update it a couple of times a month at the minimum to let those search engines know you are still alive and kicking.
April 7, 2009
Posted in: Blog on Your Dental Website, Create Great Content No Comments
3 Pitfalls to Avoid in Your Dental Website Design
In designing and optimizing websites for search engines we at the The SEM Firm has come across some common mistakes that are made in the initial stages of a website design that continue to haunt the site well after it has gone online.
Design Flexibility
The most important thing to consider when getting a new site design is how much out of pocket payment are you going to have to make if you need to make changes to that website. In many cases, to make even the slightest text change to the website you are looking at several hundred dollars. If you are needing a design element changed, you will be expected to pay more.
Don’t make this mistake at the outset of your design. Ensure that you will be able to make periodic updates to your site at the very least. The ideal situation is that you would be able to add fresh content to the site every other week or so to keep the search engines coming back frequently and ranking your site well.
Getting Too Fancy
Many dental website owners think that they need to “wow” their potential clients with fancy Flash introductions, music or other bombastic elements.
The truth is that your potential clients want to see an image of you and your staff. They want to see your phone number, address and a map to your location. They want to have a warm feeling on your site.
Steer clear of “loud” website designs.
Search Engine Unfriendly Sites
In order to be found on a search engine a website must be search engine friendly. If you are having a website designed, ensure that (at the very least) you are getting:
- Optimized Title Tags (on every page)
- Optimized Meta Description Tags (on every page)
- Optimized <h> tags (on every page)
This will require that your design firm has done a little bit of keyword research for you.
Avoiding these mistakes will help to ensure that you can continue to enjoy your dental website design for years to come.
March 21, 2009
Posted in: Uncategorized No Comments
Good Marketing Starts With a Good Platform: Wordpress as a CMS
Set it and forget it. This era is long gone in the search engine marketing industry. It used to be that you could set up a website properly and leave it to be found by Google and the others and this would be sufficient to get good rankings.
Enter Web 2.0.
I know what you are thinking… Â “I am not even Web 1.0 yet, much less Web 2.0.”
Don’t worry, there is an extremely simple way to graduate your dental website into the Web 2.0 era and its name is Wordpress.
Web 2.0 implies that the content of your dental website is fresh, up to date and interactive. Wordpress gives you all of these things and it is very easy to use (see the video below).
Wordpress spent its younger years perfecting the blogging platform. The blog you are reading right now is built on the Wordpress platform. In fact, most of the blogs you are reading are probably built on the Wordpress platform. It became popular because of the following attributes:
-Â It is FREE!
-Â It is ridiculously easy to use
-Â It is extremely friendly to search engines
-Â It is open source and there are tens of thousands of people adding great applications to it every day.
Over the last couple of years Wordpress has become much more than a blogging platform. It is an entire Content Management System that can be used to manipulate nearly every element of your website with a couple of clicks.
Don’t believe me?? Watch this short video showing you how easy it is to add content to your Wordpress site.
Web 2.0 Advantages of Using Wordpress
Control Your Own Design — Controlling the design elements on your website is just as simple as adding text content. Swap images in and out, add video, change the header image of your site all without knowing a lick of HTML or CSS.
Add Fresh Content — The search engines absolutely love websites that are adding fresh content to the web. If the search engine returns to your website time after time to find the same old stale content, it will not visit very often. The search engine will also start to think of your website as outdated and potentially full of misinformation. This is not the kind of search results Google and the others like to return for the searcher. Adding fresh content to your website using Wordpress is the most healthy action you can be taking for your website.
RSS — RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication.’ RSS is built in to every Wordpress design and it allows you to send your content out to anyone that is subscribing to your RSS feed. It is Web 2.0 at its finest. RSS subscribers can get your content where they want it and when they want it.
For those that are wondering why anyone would want to have your content about the latest piece of dental equipment in your office beamed to them via RSS, you are missing the point. RSS is a way for your content to become portable. It builds links back to your website and alerts search engines and social media sites to the fact that you have a fresh and up to date website.
Plug-Ins — A plug-in is an application that can be easily added to a Content Management System. Wordpress has thousands of them. Add scrolling images, a calendar, a contact form, and virtually anything else you can possibly think of. If you need it, chances are that someone has already created it and it is available for free.
Check out all of the Wordpress Plugins here.
Below is a link to an example website that is using Wordpress as a Content Management System:
http://www.naplesgreenbuilders.com/
Virtually everything on this site can be manipulated as easily as the text that was shown in the video above.
As always let me know if you have any questions by leaving a comment or contacting me here.
March 1, 2009
Posted in: Create Great Content, Tools for Your Arsenal, Website Design One Comment
Is Your Website Design as Well Kept as Your Office Lobby?
Said facetiously: Would you have your office lobby painted in clashing colors? Would you leave outdated magazines lying around for your patients?
Most dental practices understand that the first impression made in the office lobby is an important one. What most dental practices don’t realize is that increasingly, that first impression is being made online by your website.
Too many dental practices have web designs that are unappealing or content on the website that is outdated. And for those that don’t yet have a website for their dental practice, it is certainly time to make the move.
Although your new patient may come to you via telephone, there is a good chance that they checked you out on the web first. What did they find when they did so? You should be able to say with confidence that they found your dental website to be professionally designed, up to date and easy to use.
If you cannot say that, you should consider a redesign of your website. Potential clients do not call you when they choose to go somewhere else because of the quality of your website. They simply move on.
Redesigning a typical dental practice website is not a major project. At The SEM Firm, we charge $1500.00 for a professionally designed site that is SEO friendly. Most designers will be in the same price range. This is a significantly lower cost than you will incur from losing even one or two potential patients.
As always, you can contact me here or leave a comment on this post.
February 23, 2009
Posted in: Website Design One Comment
When Should You Start Applying SEO to Your Dental Website?
Question: When is the best time to start applying good SEO techniques to your website?
Answer: Before it is designed.
Search Engine Optimization is done best when it is incorporated into the design from the beginning. You can create a lot of extra work for yourself (or the firm you hire) if the design elements of the site are not SEO friendly. This post will detail what should be considered when planning the design or redesign of your dental practice site.
Design Elements with SEO Impact
Navigation —
Think of your navigation as huge highway signs that say “This way to information about our dental services” and “Exit here to find a biography of the dentist.”
When navigation is not considered at the design phase it can cause some serious problems. Your navigation needs to be “crawlable” and if you have been following the blog or getting the newsletter for any length of time you know that this means HTML text navigation. Use of images or javascript to display your navigation will negate the search engines ability to see your highway signs.
The other issue we see with navigation is the site architecture. Every truly important page should be linked to from the home page. If the page is too many clicks away from the home page it will be discounted by the search engine at best and not crawled at all at the worst.
Use of Flash or Images -
Although Flash is rumored to be crawled and indexed by search engines, it is not recommended that you build your site entirely in Flash. For one thing, visitors without Flash installed will not be able to view your site. As for the SEO impact, the search engines are still in the infancy of indexing Flash and my recommendation is only to use it for effect but not for displaying content.
Images are also unable to be indexed. If your content is contained in images, the search engine will not be able to view this text and therefore will not be able to display it in the search results.
Use of Content Management System -
This element is deserving of an entire post to itself because there are 100’s of different CMS systems. A Content Management System (CMS) is software that is installed on your server that gives you a User Interface to upload images, change text, and otherwise manipulate the site without needing HTML or CSS skills. They are great if you use the right one!
If you are using or plan to use a CMS you should check around to ensure that it is SEO friendly. At the very least you need to be able to do the following through your User Interface:
- Manipulate Title Tags
- Manipulate Meta-Description
- Add content to pages, including the home page
Also, if you are unable to get FTP access to your server, you should reconsider using that CMS. That goes double if you cannot do the three things listed above.
I am a huge advocate of using the Wordpress CMS to design your entire dental practice website.
Ability to Manipulate Meta Information -
As I mentioned in the CMS section, you will need to be able to manipulate all of the elements in the head of your website. This includes title tag, meta-description, and meta-keywords. Check out this post for more information on this subject
Use of Frames -
If your new or existing design is frame based this should throw up a big red flag. If your site was recently designed it is probably not in framesets but I have seen a few cases of newer designs incorporating frames as well.
To check if you are in frames:
1. View the Source Code of Your Website (View > Source in IE and Safari and Ctrl+U in Firefox)
2. Use Ctrl + F to find the text “frames”
If you find that the word frames appears in your source code and it is not part of your text content, contact me here and I will have a look for you.
Don’t make the mistake of considering the search engine marketing of your website after your design or redesign. Ensure that the design firm that you hire has a good answer to all of the questions raised by the above.
As always feel free to contact me any time by clicking on the NEED HELP? button in the top navigation or leave a comment on this post.
February 19, 2009
Posted in: Website Design 2 Comments
Video Quick Tip: Does Google Know What You Are All About?
Have you ever marveled at Google’s ability to rank billions of web pages on the Internet in a split second? Add on to that that there is a limitless number of keyword phrases that could be typed in at any time. How do they do it!?
The search engines do it by sending a search engine “spider” (automated program) to your website to “index” the content on your site. They then return and dump your content into their index to be categorized. Your job as a website owner and my job as an SEO is to make it as easy as possible for the search engine to index and categorize your site.
“AH HA! This page is about crowns!”
“AH HA! This page is about porcelain veneers!”
This video has some great examples of sites that are making it hard on Google and the others by not including enough content. If you want a real crisp and clear version of this video you can click here.
Check out your site in SEO Browser and ’see what the search engine sees.’
If you are seeing that you have no content for the search engines to index, you have an easy fix. Add some good, keyword rich HTML content to your site. Consider moving your site to a platform that makes it easy for you to add content to your site. Wordpress is the most SEO friendly and user friendly system available and it is FREE! Wordpress will give you the ability to add fresh content to your site with just a couple of clicks.
As always if you have questions, please let me know by leaving a comment on this post or contacting me here.
February 17, 2009
Posted in: High Impact Actions, Tools for Your Arsenal No Comments
The Four C’s of Professional SEO for your Dental Practice Website – Part 4 – Conversions
Pop Quiz:
Which of the following is most important to the bottom line of your dental practice business?
A. Higher rankings in Google
B. More traffic on your website
C. More links to your website.
D. More patients in your appointment book
I won’t insult you by pointing out the obvious answer to the question. However, I will point out that 80% of the dentistry practice websites that I have viewed do not address this problem appropriately. Read on to find out how to graduate to the next level of internet marketing.
Why did I save this post as the finale of this series on the categories of professional SEO? Because it is by far the most critical and the most often left neglected. It is the bottom line. It is what pays the bills. It is “Conversions.”
A “Conversion” for the sake of this post is the act of converting a website visitor to a patient of your dental practice. For an e-commerce store it would be the sale of a product and for a charity website it would be a donation to the cause.
It is the most neglected of the four C’s because it is often considered to be the last piece of the puzzle.
Quick Check-Up
Try this:
Navigate to your website and have a look with fresh eyes. Do not scroll down the page or click on any of the links. Can you identify without a doubt a clear Call To Action on your screen? If you can identify the Call to Action this post may not be worth your time. But if your website is like most that I have seen — read on.
The Call to Action
When we are searching the Internet for the solution to a problem (I have an achy tooth, I need to reach someone that can discuss the cost of Invisalign) we are wanting needing someone to smack us over the head with clear instructions describing how to ENGAGE with your business.
“Contact us Today for a Consultation”
“Get your Smile Analysis Today”
These communicate urgency. They tell the prospect what to do. They are clear Calls To Action.
The Offer
Give me a reason to ENGAGE with your business. Consider the difference between the above and the below:
“Contact us Today for a FREE Initial Consultation”
“Get your complimentary Smile Analysis Today”
As a potential patient, I need to know why I should choose you over your competition and (again) I need to be hit over the head with the message.
Observe the difference between this:
Example of No Offer
And this:
Call to Action with Offer
The Vehicle
Give me as many clear methods of ENGAGEMENT as possible:
-Â A phone number
-Â A lead form
-Â An email address
Make it Accessible
Make these methods of contact available on EVERY page of your website. When I visit your website I may be ready to fill out a lead form, make a call or send an email immediately. I also may be interested in reading about your staff, the atmosphere of your practice or finding more information about your location or the services you provide.
At any point while investigating your practice I may decide that you are the dentist for me. It is at this point that you must have these methods of Conversion available. Make it available on EVERY page.
By signing up for the free eNewsletter you will get access to the video “6 Proven Methods to Generate Dental Patients From Your Website.” In this video I show two websites that are doing a phenomenal job at displaying Calls to Action and Conversion Methods.
As always let me know if you have questions by contacting me here or leaving a comment on this post.
February 10, 2009
Posted in: Converting Traffic to Patients, Four C's of SEO No Comments
Is SEO in Your Dental Websites Head?
The “head” of a website is critical to the success of your dental website. This post will show you how easy it is to optimize the “head” of your website for the search engines.
The “head” of your website code contains three extremely important components that should be optimized:
1. Title Tag
2. Meta Description
3. Meta Keywords
Why is the Title Tag Important to Your Dental Website?
The title tag is the most important piece of real estate in your code because the search engines treat it like a signboard that is telling them exactly what that page is about. This tag needs to be optimized using the keyword phrases that you are targeting on that page.
This tag is also the piece of text that will be displayed by the search engines in the search results page (see image below). An optimized title tag will increase the number of times someone will click on your result.
The title tag should be unique on each page, containing keywords that you are targeting on that page and your geographical location. DO NOT have the same title tag on every page of your website!
Example Search Result with Title and Meta Desription Notated
Why is the Meta-Description Important to Your Dental Website?
The meta-description is the text that is very often displayed by the search engines (see image above) in the search results page. An optimized meta-description will increase the number of times someone will click on your result.
The meta-description should be unique on each page, it should read naturally and contain keywords that you are targeting on that page and your geographical location. DO NOT have the same meta-description on every page of your website!
Why is the Meta-Keywords Tag Important to Your Dental Website?
The short answer to this is that the meta-keywords are not important anymore. Search engines used to use this to decide which keywords to display a website for but spammers took advantage of it by cramming it full of keywords that were not relevant to the page. This tag is less important now but it is still good practice to optimize your meta-keywords.
Include keywords that you would like that page to be ranking for in this tag but don’t stress over it too much.
OK… let’s find these tags on your own dental practice website. Use this image and follow the procedure below to find them on your own website:
Website Head Example
Follow this procedure:
1. Navigate to your website
2. View the source code of your website — In Firefox you will use Ctrl + U, in Internet Explorer 7 you will select “Page” then “View Source” and in Safari you will select “View” and then “View Source”. You are now viewing the code that the browser (Firefox, IE, or Safari) uses to determine how to display your site visually.
3. Find the title, meta-description, and meta-keywords tags in your head using the image above as a guide.
At this point you have determined one of three things:
1. You have all of these tags in your head and they look great.
Remedy: Sleep well knowing the head of your website is working while you rest.
2. You have all of these tags in your head and they don’t look optimized.
Remedy: Optimize those tags. See the rest of this post.
3. You don’t have some of these tags in your head.
Remedy: Create those tags and optimize them.
How to optimize your title, meta-description, and meta-keywords tags for Search Engines
You will need to be able to make changes to your code through an editor like Adobe Dreamweaver or you may be using a website Content Management System (CMS) in which case you will need to find the place in your system to change these components. Contact your web professional or contact me here … this is not a big job but it is an important one.
Hopefully you have been reading this blog for a while and have read this post about doing keyword research. If not, no worries — read the post and do some keyword research then return to fix the head of your website.
I also have a video that I will give to you when you sign up for our Free eNewsletter that goes into depth about doing keyword research. You can sign up for the newsletter in the upper right of any page of this site.
If you have your keyword research completed, now is the time to break it out.
Ensure that all of your head tags contain the keywords that you are targeting for that page. It is really that simple. Craft your title and meta-descriptions for both readers and search engines. Don’t just cram them full of keywords.
One tricky thing to consider is that your title tag should be shorter than 64 characters in length to ensure that Google will be able to display the entire tag in their search results. If it is longer, they will crop anything after these 64 characters. The meta-description should be kept to a well written sentence or two that describes the content on that page.
The text in the title and meta-description should not be “salesy” but instead informational. Leave the selling to the call to action on the web page itself.
Let me know if you have questions by contacting me through the form here or leaving a comment on this post.
February 5, 2009
Posted in: High Impact Actions, Website Design 2 Comments